Building Expertise to Support Digital Scholarship: a Global Perspective
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Building Expertise to Support Digital Scholarship: A Global Perspective Vivian Lewis, Lisa Spiro, Xuemao Wang, and Jon E. Cawthorne October 2015 COUNCIL ON LIBRARY AND INFORMATION RESOURCES ISBN 978-1-932326-51-2 CLIR Publication No. 168 Published by: Council on Library and Information Resources 1707 L Street NW, Suite 650 Washington, DC 20036 Web site at http://www.clir.org Copyright © 2015 by Council on Library and Information Resources. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Cover illustration: © Shutterstock.com/agsandrew iii Contents About the Authors......................................................v Acknowledgments . vi Foreword, by Chuck Henry.............................................vii Executive Summary ....................................................1 Introduction ...........................................................4 Core Questions.....................................................5 Literature Review ..................................................5 The Components of Expertise . 6 Methods ..............................................................7 Site Selection.......................................................7 Conducting the Interviews...........................................8 Analysis...........................................................8 Study Limitations...................................................9 Challenges Faced during the Study ..................................10 Skills, Competencies, and Mindsets Important to Digital Scholarship.........11 How Skills, Competencies, and Mindsets are Developed . .14 Characteristics of Organizations that Enable Continuous Learning...........16 An Open and Collaborative Culture..................................17 International Engagement . 18 Entrepreneurial Ethos ..............................................19 Teaching and Learning .............................................19 Facilities..........................................................20 Digital Scholarship Expertise in a Global Context..........................20 Tradition of Digital Scholarship .....................................21 Funding ..........................................................22 Role of the Research Library and Campus Computing ..................24 Academic Career Structure .........................................25 Challenges Faced by Digital Scholarship Organizations . 26 iv Funding ..........................................................26 Lack of Time ......................................................26 Recruitment and Retention..........................................26 Tension between Research and Services...............................28 Status Differences between Faculty and Staff ..........................28 Dealing with Change...............................................29 Facilitating Collaboration ...........................................29 Low Status of Digital Scholarship ....................................29 Language of Scholarship............................................30 Recommendations.....................................................30 Future Work..........................................................32 Conclusions ..........................................................33 References ...........................................................34 Appendix 1: Profiles of Participating Digital Scholarship Organizations ......39 Appendix 2: Sample Interview Questions.................................49 v About the Authors Vivian Lewis is university librarian at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Prior to assuming that role, she held the portfolio of associate university librarian for organizational development where she oversaw strategic planning, assessment, budget, human resources, and marketing. She is actively involved in the ongoing development of the Lewis & Ruth Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship at McMaster University. Lewis is vice chair of the Ontario Consortium of University Libraries and a member of the board of directors of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries. She is a frequent speaker and writer on topics associated with strategic planning, assessment, and workforce transformation. Lisa Spiro is executive director of Digital Scholarship Services at Rice University’s Fondren Library. Her publications include “’This Is Why We Fight:’ Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities,’’ in Debates in the Digital (University of Minnesota Press 2012), “Opening Up Digital Humanities Education,” in Digital Humanities Pedagogy (Open Book Publishers 2013), and “Computing and Communicating Knowledge: Collaborative Approaches to Digital Humanities Projects,” in Collaborative Approaches to the Digital in English Studies (Computers and Composition Digital Press 2012). Spiro was founding editor of the Digital Research Tools (DiRT) wiki, chair of the communications committee for the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, and a member of the executive council of the Association for Computers and the Humanities. Currently she is a member of the steering committee for the Texas Digital Humanities Consortium. She has a PhD in English from the University of Virginia. Xuemao Wang is dean and university librarian of the University of Cincinnati Libraries. He was formerly associate vice provost of University Libraries at Emory University and has also held positions at Johns Hopkins University’s Sheridan Libraries, the Metropolitan New York Library Council, Queens Borough Public Library, and Sichuan Institute of Business Administration in China. He holds an MBA from Hofstra University, an MLIS from the University of South Carolina, and an MLS from Kutztown University. He has held leadership positions in the International Federation of Library Associations, is currently serving as director of the board for the Center for Research Libraries, and is a member of multiple committees within the Association of Research Libraries. He also serves as a special advisor to the university's president and provost of China affairs. Jon E. Cawthorne is dean of West Virginia University (WVU) Libraries. He is responsible for Downtown, Evansdale, and Health Sciences Libraries, as well as the WVU Press. Cawthorne recently served as associate dean of public services and assessment at Florida State University Libraries. He has held progressively responsible positions in academic, public, and special library environments. His research interests include leadership, organizational development, and scenario planning for libraries. Cawthorne recently completed his PhD dissertation, “Viewing the Future of University Research Libraries through the Perspectives of Scenarios.” He is coauthor, with Joan Giesecke and Debra Pearson, of Navigating the Future with Scenario Planning: A Guidebook for Librarians (ACRL 2015). vi Acknowledgments Our study would not have been possible without the generosity and hospitality of our hosts and the openness and honesty of our interviewees. We also thank those who recommended places to visit and facilitated our research trips, as well as those who provided feedback on this report. Finally, we are grateful to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for enabling us to carry out this work. vii Foreword “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” This quotation is attributed to Harry Warner, co-founder of Warner Brothers Studios, who incredulously wonders in 1927 why movies that feature actors speaking their lines would be popular. Warner Brothers had pioneered the Vitaphone movie that used recorded background music for its otherwise silent features, which seemed to Harry Warner sufficient. The quote, while amusing, has echoes in nearly every industry over time, as the appearance or prospect of a new technology has challenged and potentially disrupted a successful way of doing business. Higher education has been roiled for a few decades now, struggling to adopt and incorporate digital technology into its methods, behaviors, and procedures. Among the more contested fields of study has been the humanities, its practitioners often publicly exhibiting the tension of digital technology abutting the centuries-old, tested scholarship that relies on analog sources and methods of inquiry deemed appropriate to those media. While it is easy for us to characterize Harry Warner’s musing as a serious miscue or misreading, it is a logical response of someone who has achieved status within a particular set of rules and behaviors when confronted with a new technology that threatens the inherited means and methods of advancement. Building Expertise to Support Digital Scholarship: A Global Perspective explores and enriches this vexed intellectual context. The authors draw on site visits and interviews of practicing digital scholars from around the world to ground their conclusions and recommendations. The principal investigators’ conversations and visits reveal heartening commonalities: digital scholarship is thriving; it is a global enterprise characterized by entrepreneurial energy, innovation, and highly collaborative communities of expertise; and it encourages a fluid interchange among professionals of various backgrounds. It succeeds in a non-hierarchical workplace in which scholars, librarians, support staff, archivists, and technologists can productively work together to create, discover, publish, and promote new forms of scholarly expression using digital technologies and tools. Such vibrant work of digital scholars in supportive